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There is a huge industry devoted to knowing the patterns and logic behind google search to sell expertise around changing the results behind google search. A business would want this to ensure that they could be the first result when a potential customer searches for something that would indicate that they are ready to make a specific purchase that the business can handle. Politicians and other public figures would want to know how to make sure that given pages or topics do not show up like how some people theorize Boris Johnson does: https://kottke.org/19/10/boris-johnson-shady-seo-master

The issue with the industry around Search Engine optimization is that if commercial and marketing interests are too good at determining what get shown to a user, then Google loses it's value to a user. API's by design are machine readable, so if Google built its site in a way where other people can query this api directly, then marketing and PR firms would be able to query this api to build datasets on the relationships between different site, their content, and their pagerank to create rough models on how to 'game the system'. Instead by only offering a server-side rendered page for search, to collect the same information for data-mining purposes, you would need to 'scrape' the page and hope that format of the page's html is consistent for a long enough period to build a scraper, and then collect the data that they need. This combined with html and css obfuscation which is common with ssr apps and webpack in general, as well as rate-limiting and some other techniques, it can quickly become infeasible for somebody to data-mine google search for these kind of uses, and Google gets to keep their value.